October 2023, Quasi Social Experiment
Ecosystem for Sustainable Well-being through Social Consciousness
Uncovering habits and behavior of students' lives in a design college by understanding internal and external factors. This is essentially a process document of building quasi-social experiments for participants.
Team: Navya S, Namitha Susan Moses, R Kalaivani, Sowmya Chandrasekaran
Objective of the study
This study aims to shed light on this question using a social experiment to understand the expression of participatory and reflexive consciousness. At its core, this social experiment is designed to understand a person's reflexive and participatory consciousness. It also focuses on developing such an experiment, which comes with challenges.
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Uncovering participatory and reflexive consciousness embedded in the behavior of a person
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To see if there is a significant difference in the level of participatory consciousness among PG and UG students
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To see if reflexive consciousness is higher in sleeping patterns depending on the course or gender of the student
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To see if having work experience has any significant impact on the reflexive behavior of the student
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To see if there is a higher impact of participatory consciousness in course choice of UG or in PG. If so, to see if it is subject to change in the duration of the course
What is consciousness in this study?
For this study, consciousness has been categorized into reflexive and participatory. This is based on a model proposed by Jay Early in the his work - The Social Evolution of Consciousness.
Participatory consciousness is defined as the way reality is experienced by a person- this involves how they respond and relate to the world through their immediate experience of it.
On the other hand, reflexive consciousness is an emergent phenomenon that occurs when one reflects on their experiences of the world. This allows people not just simply to experience life as it is but also to understand and analyze the events that occur. This allows for more meticulous reflection and enhances decision-making and planning.
Social experiment
The factors that were considered during the development of the social experiment were to uncover hidden behavior/ thought patterns by provoking a response, to not merely find out the initial preference or choice of a person but to determine why they chose what they chose, and finally to engage participants through a gamified model.​
Designing probe for the social experiment
To develop the final experiment design, we underwent multiple ideation exercises that helped us refine our method and it lead to a structured plan. The iterations were part of the process, it allowed us to acknowledge the challenge areas.
Brainstorming
Design probe - Iteration 1
Preliminary themes & questions
Iteration 1
Themes & questions
Iteration 2
Since we did not have clear themes set in iteration 1, we decided to work on a few Sustainable Development Goals and mapped out topics to focus on.
The main aim was to understand the 'why' of the answer. For example, the question could be, "How often do you buy new clothes?” The answer could be once every three months. It could be followed by “Why do you buy clothes at such frequency?" which could be answered using the thread experiment. We can list common reasons like friends' influence, new trends, etc. The labels used could represent both participatory and reflexive consciousness, which would then help us distinguish.
Since some of our questions and larger themes were overlapping, we narrowed it down to five themes during this phase.
Themes & questions
Iteration 3
During this phase, we began by writing key themes and follow-up questions to understand participants' behavior and motivations for their actions.
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Iteration 4
After getting feedback, we added memes under answers rather than keeping them plain and to make it fun and relevant.
Each participant will have a thread to connect to the images they relate to (the most). Once they connect all the answers, there will be a spin wheel with three questions and an answer card to respond to all the questions. After they've written their answers, the card needs to be tied to the thread.
Expected outcome - By probing participants through methods of gamification like the spin wheel and connecting with threads, we will understand participants' behavior and what or who influences
Four main questions with three choices as images
MATERIAL FORM
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Images - They will be mounted on a mount board with hooks on each for the participant to connect with a thread.
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A ball of yarn - It will be placed next to the board for participants to connect.
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A spin wheel to make it fun - lets us know participants' motives and influences behind their choices.
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Answer cards - to respond and tie to the thread
Pilot Testing
We conducted a pilot study with 3 participants who were 20-25 years old. We found out that the options to choose from were limited. However, we got reflexive and participatory responses, and participants explained the reasons for the chosen answers. We had to refine the questions and answers to make them more relevant, which we did in our final iteration.
Final Iteration
We chose four topics in the context of design college and began by writing all the possible answers for the questions under the topics. So, in our final iteration, we have taken four topics: lifestyle choices, spending habits, social causes, and choice of courses.
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How was it conducted?
The experiment was conducted both in person and online with the participants.
How the data was collected?
All the data was collected from the students of a design institute based in Bangalore. Participants were undergraduate or master's students of age.
Flow chart from the final iteration
Method of data storage
The flowcharts were labeled so that the choices that were made could be saved in an ABC format. Each decision/step chosen in the flowchart coincided with a single letter (A, B or C...) that represents the choices.
When a participant made a decision to choose option D first, followed by a decision labelled B, followed by a decision labeled A, their decision for that flow chart would be labelled as DBA. This was repeated for all five sections in the flowchart, and the participants' data was stored in an Excel sheet.
Experiment setup
We printed the mind map and used board pins so that each participant could mark their answers using threads of different colors.
Data collection
We invited students from a design college to participate and collected data from 10 participants aged 18-30 at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
Proposed answer codes and code values
Learnings and observations
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Collecting data in the form of measurable and quantitative outcomes posed as a challenge during the design process, as reflexive consciousness is extremely complex and often participant can be predict the desired answers. To address this, the created model attempted to better find out why decisions were made the way they were; however, gaps could exist in this, as some outcomes could have been missed in the flowchart.
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Everyone had at least some amount of reflexive consciousness, which was exhibited in the answers they provided. Overall, it was a combination of both reflexive and participatory and not one or the other entirely.
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Many answers tended to overlap in some sections. This was seen especially clearly in the section pertaining to social work. However, a more detailed data analysis is needed to confirm this.
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There is a difference in the amount of participatory consciousness involved in the choice of course between UG and PG students. The reason for this difference could be speculated as age, experience, company and so on; however further experiment is needed to prove or disprove the reasons for the difference hypothesised based on current data